Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

My friend who is the source of 90% of book recommendations, Kaitlyn, has been telling me to read this book for years. I finally had some free time after finals. I remembered that I enjoy reading books, and that I should, ahem, read a book.

The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is a memoir about death. The author, Caitlin Doughty works at a funeral home in the crematory. Her reason for taking this job is a fascination with death, rooted in a horrifying childhood experience with death.

As I shouted and waved my arms, I saw out of the corner of my eye a little girl climb up to where the escalator met the second-story railing. As I watched, she tipped over the edge and fell thirty feet, landing face-first on a laminate counter with a sickening thud.

“My baby! No, my baby!” shrieked her mother, barreling down the escalator, violently shoving mall patrons aside as the crowd swarmed forward. To this day, I have never heard anything so otherworldly as that woman’s screams.

When I was a kid, I was weirdly obsessed with death – I would always think about death while I was swimming. I never had a near death experience with water – I knew how to swim, I was always safe. Still, it was somehow deeply connected to thoughts of dying in my seven year old brain.

This may have something to do with the fact that I had heard of family members who had drowned. My dad had cousins, three of them, who all drowned on the same day in the 60’s. I grew up hearing about them in bits and pieces. They had tickets to see The Beetles, in the first concert they had in Detroit, but they drowned before the concert.

Sometimes I think of how my childhood would have been different if I had been introduced directly to death. Made to sit in his presence, shake his hand. Told that he would be an intimate companion, influencing my every move and decision, whispering, “You are food for worms” in my ear. Maybe he would have been a friend.

Doughty begins working at a funeral home and learns more and more about how to operate a crematory. She doesn’t gloss over any of the details, which is gory and fascinating at once. She describes the details of families who struggled with accepting the death of a loved one, the awkwardness of conducting a witness cremation, the avoidant cover-up of embalming. She also writes about the different funeral and death rituals in different cultures, from cannibalism to natural burials. She also describes the hands-off online cremation business that her funeral home runs.

If your father died in a local hospital, you could visit the Bayside Cremation website, type in the location of Dad’s body, print out some forms, sign them, fax them back to the number provided, and input your credit card number to the website. All of this without ever having to speak to a real person. In fact, you weren’t allowed to speak to a real person even if you wanted to: all questions had to be sent by email to info@baysidecremation.com. Two weeks later, the doorbell would ring and the postman would hand over Dad’s ashes, shipped by registered mail, signature required. No funeral home, no sad faces, no need to see Dad’s body – total avoidance for the low, low price of $799.99.

The experience working in a crematory shapes the way she views her grandmother’s death, and shapes her decision to go to mortuary school, which she covers in the memoir.

I would recommend Smoke Gets in Your Eyes to literally everyone, because we’ll all face death at some point, and it’s better to be matter of fact about it than to hide and act like it isn’t happening.